What’s New in Firefox 3

Firefox 3 is based on the new Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform, which has been under development for the past 30 months and includes nearly 2 million lines of code changes, fixing more than 12,000 issues. Gecko 1.9 includes some major re-architecting for performance, stability, correctness, and code simplification and sustainability. Firefox 3 has been built on top of this new platform resulting in a more secure, easier to use, more personal product with a lot under the hood to offer website and Firefox add-on developers.

[Improved in Beta 3!] Firefox 3 Beta 3 includes approximately 1300 individual changes from the previous beta, including fixes for stability, performance, memory usage, platform enhancements and user interface improvements. Many of these improvements were based on community feedback from the previous beta.

More Secure

[Improved in Beta 3!] One-click site info: Click the site favicon in the location bar to see who owns the site and to check if your connection is protected from eavesdropping. Identity verification is prominently displayed and easier to understand. When a site uses Extended Validation (EV) SSL certificates, the site favicon button will turn green and show the name of the company you’re connected to. (Try it here!)

[Improved in Beta 3!] Malware Protection: malware protection warns users when they arrive at sites which are known to install viruses, spyware, trojans or other malware. (Try it here!)

New Web Forgery Protection page: the content of pages suspected as web forgeries is no longer shown. (Try it here!)

New SSL error pages: clearer and stricter error pages are used when Firefox encounters an invalid SSL certificate. (Try it here!)

Add-ons and Plugin version check: Firefox now automatically checks add-on and plugin versions and will disable older, insecure versions.

Secure add-on updates: to improve add-on update security, add-ons that provide updates in an insecure manner will be disabled.

Easier password management: an information bar replaces the old password dialog so you can now save passwords after a successful login.

Simplified add-on installation: the add-ons whitelist has been removed making it possible to install extensions from third-party sites in fewer clicks.

[Improved in Beta 3!] New Download Manager: the revised download manager makes it much easier to locate downloaded files, and you can see and search on the name of the website where a file came from. Your active downloads and time remaining are always shown in the status bar as your files download.

Resumable downloading: users can now resume downloads after restarting the browser or resetting your network connection.

Full page zoom: from the View menu and via keyboard shortcuts, the new zooming feature lets you zoom in and out of entire pages, scaling the layout, text and images.

[Improved in Beta 3!] Podcasts and Videocasts can be associated with your media playback tools.

Tab scrolling and quickmenu: tabs are easier to locate with the new tab scrolling and tab quickmenu.

Save what you were doing: Firefox will prompt users to save tabs on exit.

Optimized Open in Tabs behavior: opening a folder of bookmarks in tabs now appends the new tabs rather than overwriting.

Location and Search bar size can now be customized with a simple resizer item.

[Improved in Beta 3!] Integration with the Mac: the new Firefox theme makes toolbars, icons, and other user interface elements look like a native OS X application. Firefox also uses OS X widgets and spell-checker in web forms and supports Growl for notifications of completed downloads and available updates.

[Improved in Beta 3!] Integration with Linux: Firefox’s default icons, buttons, and menu styles now use the native GTK theme.

More Personal

[Improved in Beta 3!] Star button: quickly add bookmarks from the location bar with a single click; a second click lets you file and tag them.

Tags: associate keywords with your bookmarks to sort them by topic.

[Improved in Beta 3!] Location bar & auto-complete: type in all or part of the title, tag or address of a page to see a list of matches from your history and bookmarks; a new display makes it easier to scan through the matching results and find that page you’re looking for. New in Beta 3 is an improved search algorithm which calculates the recency and frequency of a visit to come up with a frecency score that is used to determine the most relevant results.

Smart Bookmarks Folder: quickly access your recently bookmarked and tagged pages, as well as your more frequently visited pages with the new smart bookmarks folder on your bookmark toolbar.

Places Organizer: view, organize and search through all of your bookmarks, tags, and browsing history with multiple views and smart folders to store your frequent searches.

Web-based protocol handlers: web applications, such as your favorite webmail provider, can now be used instead of desktop applications for handling mailto: links from other sites. Similar support is available for other protocols (Web applications will have to first enable this by registering as handlers with Firefox).

[Improved in Beta 3!] Download & Install Add-ons: the Add-ons Manager (Tools > Add-ons) can now be used to download and install a Firefox customization from the thousands of Add-ons available from our community add-ons website. When you first open the Add-ons Manager, a list of recommended Add-ons is shown.

Easy to use Download Actions: a new Applications preferences pane provides a better UI for configuring handlers for various file types and protocol schemes.

Improved Platform for Developers

New graphics and font handling: new graphics and text rendering architectures in Gecko 1.9 provides rendering improvements in CSS, SVG as well as improved display of fonts with ligatures and complex scripts.

Color management: (set gfx.color_management.enabled on in about:config and restart the browser to enable.) Firefox can now adjust images with embedded color profiles.

Offline support: enables web applications to provide offline functionality (website authors must add support for offline browsing to their site for this feature to be available to users).

Reliability: A user’s bookmarks, history, cookies, and preferences are now stored in a transactionally secure database format which will prevent data loss even if their system crashes.

[Improved in Beta 3!] Speed: Major architectural changes (such as the move to Cairo and a rewrite to how reflowing a page layout works) put foundations in place for major performance tuning which have resulted in speed increases that continue to increase page drawing speed in Beta 3. This release also features over 90 changes that improve performance over the previous beta.

[Improved in Beta 3!] Memory usage: Over 350 individual memory leaks have been plugged, and a new XPCOM cycle collector completely eliminates many more. Developers are continuing to work on optimizing memory use (by releasing cached objects more quickly) and reducing fragmentation. Beta 3 includes more than 50 improvements to memory use over the previous beta.